LR - Create Stunning Images

[♪♪] [ADOBE TV Presents] [♪♪] [Julieanne Kost in] [♪♪] [Getting Started with ADOBE PHOTOSHOP LIGHTROOM 3] Hi and welcome. My name is Julieanne Kost. In this tutorial we're going to learn the best way to make global and local color and tonal corrections to our images. I'll begin by moving over to the Develop module. One of the nice things in Lightroom 3 is the ability to actually select different folders that you've recently visited or different collections when you're in the Develop module so that you don't have to go back to the Library module. So in this case, I've actually got the wrong folder selected. What I'd like to work on is this collection called Need to Finish. You should also know that right down here on top of the filmstrip I can select from Favorites. And although you can't see it on your screen, there's a list at the bottom of this menu that says, "Add to Favorites." When you add them to your Favorites, they become listed right here at the top, which is quite nice. All right. We've selected the correct images to work on, so let's get started. The first thing we'll want to take a look at is our histogram. As you can see, the histogram is rather flat for this image. I'd like to increase the dynamic range of it, and I can do that by either clicking and dragging in the Histogram area itself or by using the sliders down here in the Basic panel. If I hold down the Option key or the Alt key as I drag my Exposure slider, when I drag it so far that any of the bright values are clipped to pure white, I'll see a preview of those clipped values in my Image area. Then I'll know that I've gone too far and I need to back off. Then I'll let go of the Option or Alt key, and then I'll move to the blacks. I'm going to do the same thing here with my black slider, holding down the Option or Alt key until I see that I'm clipping some of my values to pure black. Now you can see that I've expanded the dynamic range of my histogram. I don't really want to go any further than that because honestly, there was nothing black in the original photograph. But I do notice that I got quite an increase in saturation. There's a variety of different ways that I can fix that. One of the things that I might want to try is simply bringing down the vibrance. We can see now that the image is much less saturated. But there's another way that I can do this too and have a little bit more control, and that's if I skip over to the HSL panel. The HSL panel stands for hue, saturation, and luminance, and it separates these three qualities of your image so that if I go over to the Saturation area, click on my Targeted Adjustment tool, and then click in the blue area and drag down, it's going to desaturate that area just like the Vibrance slider did. However, I have additional controls here over luminance. So if I click on Luminance and I grab my Targeted Adjustment tool and I click and drag down, it's also going to darken that sky. And we can see that the Targeted Adjustment tool has automatically selected the blue slider for me and has decreased it. Just like it did in the Saturation area, it decreased the saturation of that blue. I still think the overall look and feel of this image is too bright, so I'm going to return back up to the Basic panel and I'm going to come down to the Brightness area and simply drag the slider a little bit to the left. One of the things that you might have just noticed there is that when I click one panel, the other panels close. So for example, if I clicked on Split Toning right now, the Basic panel has closed so that I don't have to scroll as far. The way that you can do that is simply hold down the Control key on the Mac or right mouse click on Windows in the panel header and choose Solo Mode. That will allow you to just kind of have one panel open at a time so that if you're on a monitor like a laptop and you don't have a lot of screen real estate, it's kind of easier to navigate back and forth. All right. Let's go back to the Basic panel here. One of the other things that I'd like to do is I'd like to add a little bit of punch to this image in kind of the midtone areas. I could do that with Contrast, but you can see that it's going to also affect my shadows and my highlights. And I'm watching my histogram as I'm adding contrast so that we can see it shift. What I'd rather do is I just want to add a little bit of contrast in my midtone areas, so I'm going to use Clarity. Now you can see when I move the Clarity back and forth, really the end point, the black point and the white point of my histogram, isn't moving nearly as much. So we'll just add a little bit of clarity there. But the foreground area here of my image is still a little bit too bright. I'd really like to kind of darken it down. So once I'm finished making my global corrections, I can shift to my selective adjustments. In this case, I'll select my graduated filter. Now I can load my graduated filter with any of these parameters. It looks like the last time I changed my clarity. If I want to quickly reset that, all I need to do is double click on the word Clarity. Let's take down the exposure a bit. I'm going to actually take it down quite a bit because I want to show you that you can click and drag up into your Image area. You can see I was a little wobbly there, so if you hold down the Shift key, that will give you a nice straight vertical or horizontal drag. But obviously, that's way too much. Well, I did that on purpose so that I could show you that, just like everything in Lightroom, nothing here is permanent. So if I want to change this, all I need to do is just change the exposure. And in fact, if I decide it's not really exposure I want, it's brightness, I can just double click Exposure and then move the Brightness slider down just a little bit there. I see I'm adding a little bit of a color shift in here, so let's also take the saturation down in that area. Excellent. If I wanted to later make changes to this, there's a few things you can do with a graduated filter. You'll notice that when I position my cursor over this middle line, I get a double-headed arrow. So if I wanted to, I could rotate this graduated filter. I can also position my cursor on top of the pin and reposition the graduated filter. Or I could make the graduation a little bit shorter or a little bit longer by dragging on one of the outer lines there, so completely customizable. If I wanted to add a second graduated filter, all I need to do is click on the New button and then I could click and drag and add my second filter. Obviously I don't want that, so if I just tap the Delete key, it will delete that graduated filter. And it deleted that one because it was the active one. Let me just tap Undo, which is Command or Control Z. See how this pin has a solid point in the middle, it's black in the center? That tells me that it's selected. If I click on this pin, now it's selected. But I want to select this one, tap the Delete key, and then it will go away. I've spent all this time on this one image, but what if I move to the next image that was shot in very similar lighting conditions and I want to make those same changes? Well, it's as easy as clicking the Previous button. Now all the same effects are applied to this image, including the graduated fill and all of the changes that were made to the sky. However, this image doesn't look like it needs quite as much of the clarity, so I'm going to back off a little bit on that. You'll notice that that halo right over here disappeared. Let me show you that again. There it is with a lot of clarity. See the halo that builds up here? It's kind of making a little bit too much contrast, so I would just back off on that. But the Previous button is just great for copying settings from one image to the next, and it saves me a ton of time because now really all I'm doing is refining them. I've also noticed that I have a few spots in the sky area here that I would really like to remove. So I'm going to select my Spot Removal brush, I'm going to make sure that it's set to Heal, and then I'm going to click on top of the spot. You can make your brush larger or smaller using the right or left bracket keys. You can see that Lightroom has automatically picked an area to sample from. If it doesn't choose the right area, you can always move that area around. But in this case, anywhere in the sky is just fine. I'll go ahead and click right here and click again here. Oh, it looks like I've got some more up here and I've got one right here and here and here. I obviously don't want to have to redo that for every single image, so what I can do is in my filmstrip select all of the images that have that same spot pattern and then click the Synchronize button. Here you can see that it's checked all of the attributes to synchronize. I might not want all of the attributes, so I can check None and then just turn on the spot removal. When I click Synchronize, Lightroom has applied the same spot removal to these other three images. But you might be thinking, "What about the ones that have changed orientation?" Not to worry. Lightroom knows where those spots are and will go ahead and change them. Go ahead and zoom in here and use my navigator to move over so that you can see those spots that were at the top of the horizontal image have now been fixed on the side of the vertical image, so an easy way to remove spots within your images. All right. Let's move to the next set of images. You can see these were really shot under the same lighting conditions. So while I make a change to one image, I might want to be making the change to all of the images. That's why we have the little button here to turn on Auto Sync. Let me grab my Crop tool, and I'm going to set the aspect ratio to 1:1. I'll also reposition the crop marquee up to the top by dragging the photo down. You can see as I make these changes, all of the images that are selected have the same change applied. I'll tap Enter, Return to apply that, and let's also increase the exposure a bit here and maybe bring up the blacks just a wee bit. I realize that my histogram doesn't go over the entire dynamic range here, but I'm shooting white sand. There really was no black point. If I bring my blacks all the way up here, it starts looking really weird. That's not what the dunes look like, so I'm just going to back off a bit and I'm also going to click the black and white option here to get rid of that color cast because I really don't like it. So I'm really showing you the Auto Sync feature here, but I also just kind of want to make it clear that there's really no such thing as a correct histogram. I'm much more interested in how the photo looks than how the histogram looks. When it's important to me is when I know if I've clipped the image, when I'm actually clipping to pure black or pure white. But for now, I don't have to make this histogram go all the way from black to white. It all depends on the subject that you're photographing. For those of you who do want to be more technical, I have this image right here. You can see I'm just holding out one of these gray cards. And the reason you might want to do this is so that you have a known value of gray that you can then correct for and apply to multiple images. So for example, I'll select my white balance eyedropper and then simply click on this gray value in order to correctly white balance this image. Of course once I've done that to this image, I can then select a full range of images that were shot under the same lighting condition and we can click on Synchronize, this time synchronizing white balance to correct the white balance for the rest of the series that I've shot. Moving to this image here, this image I really want to enhance. I want to give it a lot of punch, as if I'd shot it on a chrome film like Fujichrome in the past. So I'll move over my exposure again a little bit to the right here. I'm going to increase my blacks, although I am going to hold down my Option key just to see what's clipping. See this area up here in the upper right? That's the vignette from my lens, so I don't really care if that turns to pure black. But I am going to watch these areas here. If I think they've gone a little bit too dark, I can either decrease the blacks or I can increase my fill light a little bit. All right. I also want to add a little bit of contrast to this image, which I can do using the Contrast slider right here, or I can move down to the Tone Curve panel. One of the nice features in Lightroom 3 is the ability to access a point curve. So I'll click on the icon in the lower right-hand corner of the Tone Curve panel. Let's reset it to just a linear curve. And now I can go in and click and drag down areas to make them darker or click and drag up areas to make them lighter, adding contrast with my S curve here in my Tone Curve panel. If that got a little too bright, for example, in the blues, we can move back to HSL, grab that Targeted Adjustment tool again, maybe click in the blues and drag down to desaturate them, move to Luminance, bring those down a little bit as well, and then maybe I want to click in this green-yellow area. Since I'm not sure if it's green or yellow, the Targeted Adjustment tool just works perfectly because watch. When I click and drag up, you'll notice it's actually moving the orange and yellow slider. I wasn't even over green. I'd have to come down here in order to move the yellow and the green sliders. So I'm making them a little brighter. Now I can move over to Saturation and I can also make them more saturated in order to give them a little bit more punch. I think this orange down here got a little bit too saturated, so let's click and just drag that down a bit, or we can move the orange slider--either way. If I want to see a quick before and after, I can tap the Y key. I just noticed that my tools are missing down there, because there should be an icon. So if I tap the T key, here is my toolbar that should have been showing. But if I click on Done to put back the Targeted Adjustment tool, now we can see this little icon for before and after. Y will give me that before and after. If I want to see it a little larger, tap the Tab key. So you can see just in a few moments we can really add a lot of punch to our image. All right. We'll tap Y again, tap the Tab key, bring back our panels, and move to our last image here. Obviously, we've changed location here, because I didn't photograph anything at White Sands with a really, really high ISO, but I did while I was in Miami. So let's go ahead and zoom in. You'll notice that I have zoomed in to 1:1, 100 percent. But I'm actually going to switch that just for the recording of this video. I'm going to zoom in to 2:1 in hopes that after this movie gets compressed you can still see a significant difference. I'll also close the panel on the left-hand side so that we have a little bit larger viewing area. Moving down to the Detail panel, I actually like the amount of sharpening that Lightroom is adding by default, so no problem there. I'll come down to the Noise Reduction area. You can see that we've split out the color noise from the luminance noise. So you can be rather heavy-handed on the color noise reduction. You'll notice that we got rid of all that artifacting-- there's the before artifacting; there's after-- without decreasing the saturation, the overall saturation in the image. So then I'll turn my attention to luminance, and I'll start removing some of that noise. You don't want to go too far because then it's going to look kind of smooth and weird, but I do want to reduce it maybe about 48, 50 percent here. I also have the Detail slider, which will help preserve some of those details, and a Contrast slider, which I might want to add a little contrast in an image like this. But be careful if you're working on skin tones, because it will tend to make it a little bit splotchy in those skin tone areas. So again, let's go ahead and see a before and after. You can see I'm really maintaining all that detail, that fine detail, but removing a significant amount of noise. Excellent. That wraps up this tutorial. I hope you'll join me in the Special Effects tutorial where I'll be talking more about converting to black and white and split toning, and we'll also use that Adjustment brush. But for now, I'm out of time. Thanks for joining me. I'm Julieanne Kost. [♪♪] [ADOBE TV Productions] [ADOBE TV Productions]